3DS Max has that feature: http://www.evermotion.org/tutorials/compositing/arch/

SU may not have been intended as a low poly modeller. But the userbase would like it to be in increasing number. (that the impression I get from this forum anyway.) And it's on top of nearly any SU wishlist y ou find on the net. So it would make sense for the SU team to improve on this matter. They said it them sef in their blogs, people are using SU for things they never imagined. The users are evolving, why shouldn't SU?

Apart from being able to handle higher polycount, I think ruby script optimization would be a great benefit as well. REcently, Javascript has gotten great optimizations in browsers. Seeing something similar in Ruby would be a big plus. (If it is at all possible, I know that interpreted scripts aren't as fast as compiled programmes.)

The Birds Eye View photos from live.com are not axonometric. The only way I've got a match to work is to tweak, tweak and tweak some more with photomatch. What will help greatly is if you got 3D CAD data of the surrounding area so that you have as much reference data as possible. And the end points of the perspective lines ends up far outside the photo area with the horizon very high. Allot of zooming in and out.

Sorry that I got no pain free solution. I hope you post back if you find a good workflow for this.
I'm not happy with SU's abilities to match existing models with photos. It's be much better if we could pick points from the SU model and then pick points from the photo and have SU calculate it based on a number of reference points.

@plot-paris said:

well, you can place processor intensive actions, like they occur with ruby scripts very often, on a different thread. if the UserInterface is in a seperate thread, it will never freeze and can show you the status of the process running in the background.

or when you export a huge image or animation... you send it off (to a seperate thread) and then you can continue working on the model, while the export runs in the background...

Being able to see the progress of rubys and cancel it would be great. At the moment, the moment I change focus to another window when SU is working with a ruby that uses alot of CPU, like sandbox, the UI flickers and the statusbar doesn't redraw. Not is there a way to cancel it.
There certainly is cases where SU could make use of more cores, even though not for the modelling itself.

Yet another muscle to SU.

@unknownuser said:

@thomthom said:

If I undo right after the operation it only undo each drawing operation the script did. I'd have to press undo many times to restore the mesh.

Do you mean that each Undo will cancel a call to the Round Edge script, or that you need several Undos for a single Round Edge operation ? (in this latter case, this is strange, because I don't have the problem).

Thanks to advise

Fredo

It was the latest V-Ray for SketchUp 1.00.74 that interfered with the undo. Using the original VfSU the Round Edge operation could be undone as expected. With the latest VfSU undoing would undo each step of the script operations one by one.

Only thing I've heard of is that some AMD based machines end up in an endless loop of BSOD and restart. Happened with my brother. You might want to check your hardware if you got an AMD machine.

As said before, purge the model. (Ensure that there isn't any hidden geometry that doesn't need to be tehre.) Then if the size is still large, go through your materials and ensure your textures are stored in a compressed format. I prefer PNG formats as they don't loose any quality, but JPEG can work as well. Anything that isn't PNG or JPEG you should resave in another format.

I've had the same experience. All scenes set up, then last minute addition to one scene which cascades into all the rest where I don't want it.

Also, are your graphic card drivers up to date?

The only difference with SU and most other 3D software is that SU allways display the backface. You can do this in most other applications as well, you just have to enable it.

SU automatically welds geometry together when it meets. Unfortunately there isn't any function to weld together nearby geometry. That's why it's important to ensure everything snaps correctly when you draw.

The Elev45shadows.rb ruby from http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDepot/Ruby/EM/

My name is Thom and I like to stuff SU full of polygons and high-res textures.

@bigstick said:

Apart from Al's iRender, there are 2 other applications that run inside SketchUp, IDX Renditioner and Podium.

And V-Ray for SketchUp from ASGVIS.

i love these trees. If you where to make a bundle with more trees and bushes I'd buy'em.

If you can use a 64bit OS. If current software solutions at your office doesn't allow it, ensure that the hardware is 64bit capable in case you can upgrade later. Working with 3D rendering will quickly eat up your memory, if can go 64 bit then do it. (I'm now talking generally, not for just SketchUp.) The next Photoshop that's to be released soon will finally have 64bit support

Go for an nVidia Quadro card if you can. They are true workhorses.

Another page for the book of SketchUp quirks...

I got the European bundles of XFrog trees and they're really nice. You will have some initial work to set them up for SU. If you get the packages you should also get the tuner application to crush down the polygons to a minimum. The trees will still look good. What's also good is that with the DVDs you get all the trees as billboards. Very nice for populating the background, saving polygons by only using 3d trees in front. Last week I finished a model of a huge site which I populated with 4000-5000 trees (thanks to Component Spray). I had left all the billboards with only one face and four edges (meaning, square SU shadows) so even with that many trees the model was manageable.

@gaieus said:

You are right. But also, think about it; many of the people who download and start using SU don't care too much about really learning the program since even from the very beginning they seem to be able to model things with ease. Then they get stuck at a level but that's enough for them and they do not even imagine how powerful application it can be in experienced hands.

The same thing happens in many professions. Webdesign for instance is a very good example.